Students must have been exposed to academic research when they went to college. A lot of students even start research practice in high school to prepare for college. Today I’ll introduce you to two types – Quantitative Research and Qualitative Research. When you are in class, how do you write the assignments you are given to avoid mistakes? Let’s take a look at it next!
The first, quantitative research (Positivist empirical research).
Main application areas: psychology, economics, demographics, gender studies, sociology, market research, and public health, etc.
Motivation: testing hypotheses
The focus is usually on a large sample size
During the research process, the researcher is strictly neutral and maintains an appropriate distance from the subjects;
Often takes the form of a questionnaire, with questions set by the researcher in advance;
The use of statistical tools to analyse data to further corroborate hypotheses; and
Focusing on the separation of the longitudinal research project from the environmental context;
For example, a 2022 article by Kukar- Kinney explored the online shopping cart usage of 179,473 users of a European e-commerce company, and by analysing their browsing behaviour, seven hypothesised results were derived. These include the conclusion that product browsing is inversely proportional to shopping cart usage and that autonomous search is positively proportional to shopping cart usage. Additionally he has studied the development of gender awareness in 54 pupils in 3 UK primary schools Surveyed and came up with 5 hypotheses and found that such children are better at making friends of the same sex, preferring to participate in boyish activities/personalities, etc. (Braun, Gender (Non) Conformity in Middle Childhood, 2016).
For small sample sizes, it is equally possible to conduct quantitative research, such as this study on gender cognitive development using 54 pupils from three primary schools. The study showed that the children in the sample were more likely to make friends of the same sex than of the opposite sex, and were more interested in things that boys liked. This humanised perspective of the study (emic: the researcher being a participant) gives us a deeper understanding of the topic (Braun, Gender (Non)Conformity in Middle Childhood, 2016).
On the other hand, qualitative research (Interpretive Interpretive Research).
Main fields of application: anthropology, sociology, psychology, linguistics, semiotics, education, history and other humanities disciplines
Motivation for research: deep digging L Deep human inquiry
Focus is often on a very small number of more typical samples
During the study, the researcher gets closer to the real lives of the subjects and prefers internal profiling;
Tend to talk to the participants in depth to get the most authentic feelings;
Focus on the accumulation of details and the reduction of specific situations;
Expertise in a variety of research methods, from ethnography to observation to direct dialogue, and use this to generalise, interpret and decipher conclusions;
Emphasis on people-centredness, with questions starting from the research subject (emic: the researcher as a participant);
For example, How Clim-ate Change Comes to Matter is an article from Callision that interviews five American groups involved in climate change, with different types of people activating and expanding the environmental allegory through different forms of environmental thinking. On the flip side, extreme environmental phenomena such as climate change are often closely related to linguistic communication (Callision, How Clim-ate Change Comes to Matter).
